Link roundup for 25 May 2013

A few articles:

• Zulu is now compulsory in the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.
• Stellenbosch University starting in 2014 will have simultaneous interpretation between English and Afrikaans (and vice versa) in order to do away with students having to choose between classes in one language and another.
• A discussion in Esperanto on the pronunciation of c, plus antaŭ vs. ante, etc.
• The Financial Times has launched a new Spanish-language service, focused on Latin America.
• A Vatican Radio broadcast with the fairly well-known Latinist Reginald Foster.

Finally something interesting on Wikipedia that is usually found in the less-used languages but now in the 1 million+ ones:

That's a list of the largest Wikipedias by number of articles, and going back at least to 2005 the ranking by article count has always been English, then German, and then French about 100,000 articles behind German. Over the past few weeks Dutch has all of a sudden gone from a bit over 1 million to nearly 1.6 million, leaping over French and soon to be the second-largest after English. This of course is artificial and mostly done by bots, and the number of edits, users and depth make this clear:

Edits: German 124 million, French 93 million, Dutch 38 million
Users: German 1.7 million, French 1.6 million, Dutch 0.5 million
Active users: German 20.8 thousand, French 18 thousand, Dutch 4.7 thousand
Depth: German 89, French 162, Dutch 10

So there may be some grousing soon after Dutch takes over second place in this ranking.

Below the 1 million mark the two worst offenders are: Waray-Waray and Cebuano, both with 350,000+ articles and a depth of 3 and 4. The ones with the best depth on that level: Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian.

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Draft law passes Galician parliament calling for stronger Portuguese-language ties

From here in Portuguese:

The Galician parliament unanimously approved the consideration of a draft law of a popular initiative calling for greater weight of the Portuguese language in the Spanish autonomous region. 

More than 17,000 Galicians signed a petition for more "access to the wealth of the Portuguese language". The initiative now passed puts into consideration the teaching of Portuguese in Galician schools, better use of the language in Galician public institutions, transmission of TDT (Televisao Digital Terrestre) television channels from Portugal, and access to national radio frequencies from the other side of the border. 

There is still no timetable for the proposal, which advocates the introduction of the Portuguese language at all levels of education, to become law, but Xosé Carlos Morell (the proponent of the initiative, known as Iniciative Paz Andrade) believes that a four-year period would be reasonable for the implementation of Portuguese in Galician schools.

Looks like the Facebook page for the initiative is here.

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May 19, 1913: new Balkan war foreseen

Thanks to Times Machine it's easier than ever before to get the news from a century ago, and today's paper has a small blurb on page 3:

FORESEE NEW BALKAN WAR. 

Daily Chronicle Says Greece and Servia May Fight Bulgaria. 

LONDON, Monday, May 19. -- The Daily Chronicle says that the situation in the Near East has gone from bad to worse and that there is great danger of that troubled region being the theatre of another war. The Chronicle's special Balkan correspondent says he has excellent authority for stating that Greece and Servia, which did not sign the preliminaries of peace, have concluded an agreement which, it is believed, takes the definite form of a treaty, the main points of which are a common policy regarding the conquered territories and an alliance against Bulgaria. There is even danger, says the correspondent, of an immediate ultimatum to Bulgaria.

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Short story recorded in 19 Arabic dialects (so far)

Keep an eye on this page and this page on Reddit - it's a short story read in the dialects of any Arabic speakers who want to participate. 19 so far, discussion here, and probably lots more to come.

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Portuguese fifth-most used language online, Chinese very close to English

Came across an article here, apparently referencing data from the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body. After a good amount of searching on the ITU site though it turns out that the numbers do not come from there, they come from our well-known Internetworldstats, a very interesting site to visit but one that updates its numbers perhaps once a year.

French at 60 million still seems very low, and I wish they would add more languages to this top ten. Other back in 2009 was 15.1%, now it's 17.8%.

Portuguese is the fifth most "spoken" language on the internet. Data provided by the International Telecommunication Union show Portuguese to have surpassed Arabic, French and German among the languages with the largest number of online users. The expansion of the internet in Brazil in the past ten years explains most of this, giving at least 83 million people using Portuguese online. The expectation is that it will surpass Japanese (99 million users), reaching fourth place. 

Other numbers:  

English: 565 million
Chinese: 510 million
Spanish: 165 million
German: 75 million
Arabic: 65 million
French: 60 million

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Chris Hadfield in Kazakhstan speaking Russian with a robe, lute and doll

Chris Hadfield is back safe on Earth and this video is exactly what the title says it is:



It's dubbed so the Russian can't always be made out but he sounds fluent. Not sure if it's functionally fluent, near-native fluent or completely fluent.

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